Avatar error in your favor: Embodied avatars can fix users’ mistakes without them noticing

Abstract

In immersive Virtual Reality (VR), users can experience the subjective feeling of embodiment for the avatar representing them in a virtual world. This is known to be strongly supported by a high Sense of Agency (SoA) for the movements of the avatar that follows the user. In general, users do not self-attribute actions of their avatar that are different from the one they actually performed. The situation is less clear when actions of the avatar satisfies the intention of the user despite distortions and noticeable differences between user and avatar movements. A within-subject experiment was here conducted to determine whether a finger swap helping users achieve a task would be more tolerated than one penalizing them. In particular, in a context of fast-paced finger movements and with clear correct or incorrect responses, we swapped the finger animation of the avatar (e.g. user moves the index finger, the avatar moves the middle one) to either automatically correct for spontaneous mistakes or to introduce incorrect responses. Subjects playing a VR game were asked to report when they noticed the introduction of a finger swap. Results based on 3256 trials (∼24% of swaps noticed) show that swaps helping users have significantly fewer odds of being noticed (and with higher confidence) than the ones penalizing users. This demonstrates how the context and the intention for motor action are important factors for the SoA and for embodiment, opening new perspectives on how to design and study interactions in immersive VR.